The Telling Read Free

over and so hidden by buildings and embankments that she couldn't remember ever having seen it except on maps.
    "You mean go outside Dovza City?"
    "Yes," Tong said. "Outside the city! And not on a guided tour! For the first time in fifty years!" He beamed like a child revealing a hidden present, a beautiful surprise. "I've been here two years, and I've put in eighty-one requests for permission to send a staff member to live or stay somewhere outside Dovza City or Kangnegne or Ert. Politely evaded, eighty times, with offers of yet another guided tour of the space-program facilities or the beauty of spring in the Eastern Isles. I put in such requests by habit, by rote. And suddenly one is granted! Yes! A member of your staff is authorised to spend a month in Okzat-Ozkat.' Or is it Ozkat-Okzat? Its a small city, in the foothills, up the river. The Ereha rises in the High Headwaters Range, about fifteen hundred kilos inland. I asked for that area, Rangma, never expecting to get it, and I got it!" He beamed.
    "Why there?"
    "I heard about some people there who sound interesting."
    "An ethnic fragment population?" she asked, hopeful. Early in her stay, when she first met Tong Ov and the other two Observers presently in Dovza City, they had all discussed the massive monoculturalism of modern Aka in its large cities, the only places the very few offworlders permitted on the planet were allowed to live. They were all convinced that Akan society must have diversities and regional variations and frustrated that they had no way to find out.
    "Sectarians, I suspect, rather than ethnic. A cult. Possibly remnants in hiding of a banned religion."
    "Ah," she said, trying to preserve her expression of interest.
    Tong was still searching his files. "I'm looking for the little I've gathered on the subject. Sociocultural Bureau reports on surviving criminal antiscientific cult activities. And also a few rumors and tales. Secret rites, walking on the wind, miraculous cures, predictions of the future. The usual."
    To fall heir to a history of three million years was to find little in human behavior or invention that could be called unusual. Though the Hainish bore it lightly, it was a burden on their various descendants to know that they would have a hard time finding a new thing, even an imaginary new thing, under any sun.
    Sutty said nothing.
    "In the material the First Observers here sent to Terra," Tong pursued, "did anything concerning religions get through?"
    "Well, since nothing but the language report came through undamaged, information about anything was pretty much only what we could infer from vocabulary."
    "All that information from the only people ever allowed to study Aka freely—lost in a glitch," said Tong, sitting back and letting a search complete itself in his files. "What terrible luck! Or was it a glitch?"
    Like all Chiffewarians, Tong was quite hairless—a chihuahua, in the slang of Valparaiso. To minimize his outlandishness here, where baldness was very uncommon, he wore a hat; but since the Akans seldom wore hats, he looked perhaps more alien with it than without it. He was a gentle-mannered man, informal, straightforward, putting Sutty as much at her ease as she was capable of being; yet he was so uninvasive as to be, finally, aloof. Himself uninvadable, he offered no intimacy. She was grateful that he accepted her distance. Up to now, he had kept his. But she felt his question as disingenuous. He knew, surely, that the loss of the transmission had been no accident. Why should she have to explain it? She had made it clear that she was traveling without luggage, just as Observers and Mobiles who'd been in space for centuries did. She was not answerable for the place she had left sixty light-years behind her. She was not responsible for Terra and its holy terrorism.
    But the silence went on, and she said at last, "The Beijing ansible was sabotaged."
    "Sabotaged?"
    She nodded.
    "By the Unists?"
    "Toward the end of the